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The sand, blown over the Delta and the cultivated land higher up the stream during the inundation, is covered or mixed with the fertile earth brought down by the river, and no serious injury is sustained from it.
Yet the soil, when justly watered, is one of the richest in the world; for Irak is an immense alluvial delta, more than five hundred miles from end to end, which the Tigris and Euphrates have deposited in what was originally the head of the Persian Gulf.
Until about 1850 the sugar district as well as the cotton belt was calling for labor from whatever source it might be had; but whereas the uplands had work for people of both races and all conditions, the demand of the delta lands, to which the sugar crop was confined, was almost wholly for negro slaves.
Descending a few miles farther, in the small fertile delta of the Lachlan, and overshadowed almost by the old square castle of the M'Lachlans, there is a bushy enclosure which may be identified as the old burial-place of Kilmory. A large block of hewn stone, with a square hole in it, sets one in search of the cross of which it was the socket.
The old highway from Egypt, which left the Delta at Pelusium, at first follows the coast, then trends eastward across the plain of Esdraelon, which breaks the coastal range, and passing under Hermon runs northward through Damascus and reaches the Euphrates at its most westerly point.
We are now on the Bassein Creek, twenty-five miles long, going across the Delta west from Rangoon River to the Irrawaddy to steam up it for five days, tying up at night. It is better even than we were told! This steamer is long, low, and wide decked, with a nice saloon forward on the upper deck, eight cosy cabins on either side, and a promenade in front of them, on the fo'csle head as it were.
Its two chief seats were situated, the one, Heliopolis, in the North on the eastern edge of the Delta, just where an early Semitic settlement from over the desert might be expected to be found, the other, Edfu, in the Upper Egyptian territory south of the Thebaïd, Koptos, and the Wadi Ham-mamat, and close to the chief settlement of the earliest kings and the most ancient capital of Upper Egypt.
The roof of the whole long structure had originally consisted of palm branches, upon which mud and turf had been piled; but this, too, was now in repair only on the central building. On the right and left wings the rain which often falls in the northeastern part of the Nile Delta, near the sea, had washed off the protecting earth, and the wind had borne it away as dust.
When the inhabited wilderness has become an uninhabited wilderness, when the only people who will ever make their homes in it are exterminated, when the placer-gold is gone and the white men have gone also, when the last interior Alaskan town is like Diamond City and Glacier City and Bearpaw City and Roosevelt City; and Bettles and Rampart and Coldfoot; and Cleary City and Delta City and Vault City and a score of others; let at least the native names of these great mountains remain to show that there once dwelt in the land a simple, hardy race who braved successfully the rigors of its climate and the inhospitality of their environment and flourished, until the septic contact of a superior race put corruption into their blood.
Volcanic earthquakes are particularly shallow, and probably no earthquakes known have started at a greater depth than fifteen or twenty miles. This distance is so slight compared with the earth's radius that we may say that earthquakes are but skin-deep. Should you expect the velocity of an earthquake to be greater in a peneplain or in a river delta?
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